Pushbutton → Push Notification

How many mundane devices upgrade to IoT because they let you monitor a single data point or a variable? That little nudge over the communication precipice allows you to charge 500% more. Now, if you are as handy as a Hackaday reader, you can throw a lazy afternoon at the problem and get the same effect from a “dumb” appliance. If IoT is as simple as getting a notification when your laundry is dry, or your water is boiling, all you really need is a WiFi device and a push notification, right? Does it need to be more complicated than that? [Gianni] believes it is that simple (machine translation) and has built up an easy-to-implement version on Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and ESP8266.

[Gianni] leverages the aptly named Pushover (a paid app with a 1-week trial period) to convert your bits, bytes, words, or strings to a push notification. This idea is born of the desire for a home security system which doesn’t require constant monitoring but instead alerts you to problems. The minimum requirement you need is for your phone to chime with a notification saying, “Your front window sensor has been tripped.” Now it is time to launch your IP camera app or call someone nearby.

It’s not revolutionary, it may be the “Hello World” of IoT, but that is all some people need. The general idea is the same no matter the framework you want to use. For instance, if you Google Suite account, you can set up a chatroom just for your alert notifications; Google’s quickstart takes about 3 minutes to test it out in Python. The same setup is also available for Slack, and [Tom Nardi] did a guide for doing this with Discord. These tackle the receiving side, but the sending side is really flexible too — that MQTT broker you built could easily be the source of the alerts.

Build a handful of these in a weekend and keep them nearby to step up your next project to IoT status with a couple of solder joints. Maybe it will be a motion sensor for your own security system.

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21 thoughts on “Pushbutton → Push Notification”

Yep. My current IoT projects are a doorbell to wifi gateway (so I can get notifications in my shop without running more wire through a trench) and a mail arrival message sender. A car in the driveway sensor may come third. All are “something happened” gadgets of the very sort described here.

Same here, my doorbell is the only thing that’s wired up. It sends a push notification to my phone, and broadcasts a UDP packet. Two slave doorbells and a DB (for logging purposes) listen for that IDo packet.
One of the slave doorbells is a hardware doorbell made from old HD platters carefully selected for pitch :)

We have a slack setup for the house for the dual purpose of giving us iot notifications and giphy. The nice thing is each user (me and my wife) can control our own notifications. So the sprinkler notifications don’t ding at 2am.

Btw, if you need to receive notifications in the device (ESP8266, Arduino and Raspberry Pi) as well, there is another project called Pushetta that can do that (I’m the author so I know for sure :-) ) Take a look there http://www.pushetta.com. I created a bridge between a MQTT broker and the Pushetta backend so you can subscribe a topic like “/pushetta.com/channels/MYCHANNEL” from your device and receive notification sent with Pushetta’s API or web dashboard. I developed a plugin for mosquitto (the broker I’m using) to manage authentication (https://github.com/guglielmino/mosquitto-pushetta-auth-plug) but it still need some work to become full functional.

I thought the using of esp8266 devices as lower power single shot sensors was a solved issue years ago? Small piece of code that authenticates to wifi, pulls an ip, makes a web api call then goes to deep sleep. attach a button to the reset line of the ESP. every time the button is triggered, the esp resets coming out of deep sleep, and retriggers the above sequence then goes back to sleep for the next button push.

Please Help me do this im a newbie in making this kind of project and it is my thesis project anyone can help me , thank you i really need help for this thing
check this link , i want my pushbutton send a message to my personal mobile app like on this link

Something like this should be considered some kind of example project in microcontroller 101 these days. Literally something you should be able to whip together in about an hour worth in time. It is barely above a hello world program in a programming course.

I’m using IFTTT web hook (also called Maker Event) for sending me push notification on my Android phone via the IFTTT app, but from time to time I noticed push notifications could arrive as late as 30 minutes (usually happening around 1am in the morning). Not sure if the delay was caused by IFTTT server or by Google. Phone was in the house with WIFI on all the time. When whatever-cause problem is gone, I received burst of multiple notifications on my phone. Not sure why. Anyone knows what could cause this behavior? Thanks.

Have seen people mentioning of using Telegram chat for notification, but I havent tried yet.

Later I just use another 8266 running a HTTP server that beeps a buzzer when a rest API is called for critical notification.